Macaroni and cheese and mushrooms and broccoli in a cast iron skillet

Autumnal pizza: onions, squash, kale, blue cheese, and walnuts

We made one of our better pizzas a few days ago, when J and A joined us for dinner. As with our other recent meals, we forgot to take photos.

In the morning, make a pizza dough. Dissolve a tablespoon or so of honey in about a cup of warm water, and then whisk in a tablespoon of instant yeast. In the standing mixer, combine two cups white flour and a bit more than a cup whole wheat, and a tablespoon of salt. Then pour in the yeast mixture and mix to combine. You don't need to knead that much. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and place in the warmest part of your house. Since our heater isn't working, the best spot for us was in the oven (turned off) right above the pilot light.

About an hour before you want to eat, remove the dough from the oven, and begin preheating to 450–500ˆ with the pizza stone inside. Divide the dough into two pieces and roll it out with a floured rolling pin. You want to let the dough rise a little rolled out, so if your kitchen is still very cold, place the rolled-out dough in the oven for just about two minutes (enough to get a bounce, but not enough to kill the yeast).

Thinly slice a large white onion, and saute it in some olive oil and salt until translucent. Set aside. Peel two delicata squash, cut into half- or quarter-inch rings, and poke/cut out the seeds. Heat some oil, and fry the rings of squash on both sides until just starting to brown. Bring to a boil a medium pot of water with a teaspoon of baking soda. Wash, destem, and cut into half-inch ribbons one bunch kale, and boil in the soda water for just a minute or two, so tenderize and bring out the bright green color (the soda is to prevent discoloration: what makes vegetables discolor when cooking is the acids released from the veggies). Drain the kale and rinse under cold water so you can handle it.

Cut a little less than a pound of mozzarella into thin slices. Begin assembling the pizzas: onions as a "sauce", then a single layer of squash, then the kale, then mozzarella. On top of that, crumble about half a pound of a strong blue cheese, and then top the pizza with fresh walnuts.

Bake each pizza between twenty and twenty five minutes. This type of autumnal pizza will pair with any wine or beer that you like, but cold weather calls for a hearty red.

Spanish stew with chickpeas, clams, and sausage

We were four tonight at our table: joining us for dinner was Monica (of Gastromonica fame, and one of my favorite cooks and people) and her partner. A high-risk strategy for dinner, B and I decided to try a new recipe from Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook: a Spanish-style stew with chickpeas, clams, and sausage. The meal was sufficiently fantastic that we forgot to take any photographs.

The night before you want this stew, cover 1 ½ cups dried chickpeas with plenty of water, and let soak overnight (beans will double in size). In the morning or mid-day, drain the chickpeas and add a small white onion, one or two carrots, a celery stick if you have one, some bay leaf, some fresh thyme, and 1 Tbsp of salt; cover with water, bring to a boil, and simmer on low 90 minutes. Let the beans cool in their liquids. When you start cooking, drain the chickpeas and discard the veggies.

In the bottom of a large pot, brown 1 lb pork sausage (we used the breakfast links from Highland Hills, as it was all that was left when we got to the market today), crumbled or cut into small meatballs, in 1 Tbsp olive oil. Remove the meat to a bowl, and discard the liquid. Meanwhile, finely mince a large white onion, or, more easily, chop it coarsely and then puree in the food processor.

Add a little more olive oil to the pot and cook the onion until lightly browned. Meanwhile, finely mince (puree in food processor) one fennel bulb and lots of garlic, and add to the onion, along with a little salt. Cook a bit longer, and add one medium-spicy pepper, in small diced, and 1 Tbsp paprika. Also add a handful of small or two medium-large tomatoes, cut into medium dice.

Clean 3 lb manila clams while the vegetables cook.

Finally, stir in the chickpeas and the sausage, and cover and bring back to a simmer. Then add ½ cup white wine, ½ lb young braising greens or chard cut into ½-inch strips, and the clams. Cover and cook five to ten more minutes, stirring once or twice, until the clams have all opened.

While the clams cook, lightly toast some slices of a nice bread, and rub each slice with a clove of garlic. Serve the stew in shallow bowls, with a slice of bread at the bottom of each bowl and the stew spooned over it.

Accompany the stew with good company, fun conversation, and a nice Pinot Grigio (also set out the remaining bread with some butter). After the stew, serve a lettuce salad with a sherry vinaigrette as a palate cleanser.

Open a bottle of fine Moscatel, and move from the dining room table to the living room couch. Set out a plate of figs from the neighbors tree, cut into quarters with a dollop of a nice sheep's cheese on each, and sprinkled with chopped almonds and honey. Conclude the meal with macadamia-and-white-chocolate cookies.

Gnocchi with blue-cheese-almond "pesto" and arugula

Composed salad with homemade bread

Rather than making our usual salad, we followed a recipe from Chez Panisse Vegetables, which asked for us to stew onions with wine, oil, slices of lemon, and fresh herbs/spices (whole garlic cloves, bay leaves, pepper corns), and then to add cauliflower florets. The cauliflower is cooked on heat only until it's just starting to turn tender, but then the stew is allowed to cool and refrigerated overnight before serving. We served the cooked lemon slices as garnish on the salad, and for the rest of the salad we included stewed beets, canned whole sardines, and green beans blanched in the onion stewing liquid.

We also made a whole wheat baguette, and set out butter and a wonderful Italian goat cheese that our friend M had given us.

Homemade farfalle with tomatoes, basil, and ricotta salata

Picnic before Much Ado About Nothing

Dinner picnics are a wonderful treat, and live theater is another. The California Shakespeare Theater encourages you to do both, by surrounding the outdoor stage with beautiful hills and a lovely picnic ground. We have seen two shows with CalShakes, and were unimpressed with their Twelfth Night last year, but this summer's Much Ado About Nothing was wonderful.

For dinner, B made a seeded baguette, which we had with Fromager d'Affinois and radishes. I made a light entre salad: blanched green beans, carrots, Oregonzola, fantastic heirloom tomatoes, and a shallot dressing.

Almost always, you should serve red wine at a picnic, even if you are serving food you might pair with white at home — the temperature starts to drop as you are finishing your meal. The CalShakes theater is happy to let you bring drinks in (they sell wine, coffee, and hot chocolate), so bring a half-bottle of something sweet for the show.

Tomato, basil, and mozzarella pizza

Heirloom tomatoes from Riverdog, basil and basil flowers from the garden, fresh mozzarella from Belfiore.

Grilled prawn and halloumi salad

Peel and devein prawns. Collect cherry tomatoes from garden. Cut halloumi into squares. Separate the layers of a small red onion (not pictured) and cut into squares.

Put prawns, cherry tomatoes, cheese, and onions on skewers, and grill the ingredients until cooked (prawns should be pink throughout; cheese should be barely charred; tomatoes should be starting to burst; onions should be softening).

Wash and rip lettuce. Add a sliced Armenian cucumber, maybe some fresh oregano and mint, and the roasted ingredients. Toss everything with a lemon-olive-oil-garlic dressing. Serve with chardonnay or your favorite rose.

Brunch: baked eggs in tomatoes

Select unblemished, firm early-girl tomatoes, and hollow them out: remove the stems and scoop out the seeds and pulp. Sprinkle a little salt on the inside of each tomato, and set them in a muffin tin. Crack an egg into each tomato, and sprinkle the top with grated parmesan or romano cheese. Bake under the broiler about fifteen minutes: the goal is to cook the white most of the way through but leave the yolk runny.

Carefully scoop the cooked tomatoes (and any white the spilled out) out of the muffin tins, and serve in shallow bowls. Garnish the baked tomatoes with capers and nicoise olives.

Lunch: Greek salad and cappuccino

In the salad we had an Armenian cucumber from Riverdog, sliced and dressed in balsamic vinaigrette; cubed French feta cheese; and early girl tomatoes, fresh basil, and fresh oregano from the garden. The coffee, as always, is made with Straus milk and Blue Bottle espresso.

Huckleberry Weekend

Friday

JB is a good friend of mine from college. She's in the area, and she joined us for a wonderful afternoon stroll through Huckleberry Botanic Regional Preserve, one of the East Bay Regional Parks (we're working our way south). The park is not large, but includes a beautiful two-mile nature trail, with wonderful plants. In particular, we were amazed to see the eponymous bushes filled with berries. B and I decided to make sure to go picking the following day. Here's the slide show of the park from our two days of hiking:



Saturday

We brought a picnic with us for our second trip to Huckleberry Preserve, eating at the bench by #6. The dinner consisted of kumamoto oysters from Hog Island, Fromager d'Affinois with homemade baguette, and salad.








Sunday

We filled two yogurt containers with berries — close to eight cups. We processed all the berries into preserve: huckleberry preserve from the Huckleberry Preserve. This morning (Monday) we had some of the jam at breakfast. It is, perhaps, the best jam we've made.

Saag paneer and dal

Begin by mincing a fair amount of garlic, ginger, and turmeric. Also dice a very large white onion. Separate the onion into two pots, and saute with a little butter and salt until tender, adding in the spices as soon as the onion begins to release its juices. Add also a fair amount of curry powder to each pot.

To the smaller of the two pots, add a cup of red lentils, and about a cup and a half of water. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook twenty to thirty minutes until the lentils are very soft. Stir it occasionally and check to make the lentils are not sticking, replenishing the water as necessary.

To the larger pot, add the washed, sliced greens from a bunch of beets and also a bunch of rainbow chard (remove most of the stems). Put the greens in a bit wet. Cover the pot, and steam the greens until they have reduced; stir them into the soft onions. Cube a brick of paneer or haloumi into and mix into the juices, watching as the turmeric stains the cheese yellow. Open a two-cup tub of sour cream, and mix in a lot of curry powder and a lot of cumin. Stir the sour cream into the greens.

Serve both dishes warm and a bit gloopy.

Pizza with apples, walnuts, and blue cheese

This pizza, with sauteed apples, mozzarella and blue cheese, and walnuts was very tasty, but would have made a better lunch that dinner. Somehow, without the tomatoes or another sauce (sauteed onion would have works well), the pizza didn't really feel full enough for a dinner. But it was very good, and I do recommend the combination: in general, anything that can go on a salad can go on a pizza.

Snack: berries and gouda

Ratatouille lasagna

We love the flavor combination of ratatouille: tomatoes, eggplant, summer squash, supplemented with onions, garlic, peppers, and herbs. But the vegetable mix is never satisfying as a dinner: you eat and eat and eat and never fill up. Much better is a lasagna, layering the vegetables between cheese and pasta. So we decided the have the best of both worlds.

We began by slicing and lightly salting the vegetables (eggplant, onions, bell peppers, zucchini) and spread them in single layers in pans to roast uncovered in the oven. Meanwhile, we made a pasta dough with one part white flour to two parts semolina, a little salt, a couple eggs, and enough water to hold it together but not so much as to make the dough tacky. We rolled the dough through the hand-cranked pasta maker and let it dry on a rack. Then we put together our cheese mixture: minced garlic, grated mozzarella, grated romano, fresh thyme, grated black pepper, and ricotta. Finally, we diced some tomatoes, saving the juive, and mixed in some diced onion and chopped basil and a little salt.

Ingredients prepared, we started layering the lasagna. Begin by putting a splash of oil and just a little of the tomato juice at the bottom of the pan, and then a layer of noodles. Then some of the tomato mixture, a layer of zucchini, and a layer of cheese, with some of the roasted onions and peppers dotted through. On top of all this, another layer of pasta, then tomatoes, eggplants, cheese, and continuing in this way until the casserole is assembled. End with noodles and a thick layer of cheese, decorated with some roasted onions and peppers.

Cover the casserole with a tent of foil, and bake about half an hour. Then remove the foil and cut it into strips to wrap just around the edges of the pan, so that any noodles showing don't crisp too much in the oven, and bake another half hour. Let the casserole cool about ten minutes before slicing and serving.

Camping: tomato, basil, and fresh mozarella sandwich on the top of a mountain

Hand-made pesto with hand-made semolina egg noodles